Okanagan Nation Alliance hatchery work key as salmon run return 10 per cent of year prior

A very low return year of sockeye salmon to the Okanagan River has staff at the Okanagan Nation Alliance hatchery focused on building numbers with their egg take and fertilization process.

Crews worked down the river in Oliver, collecting broodstock for the hatchery located on Penticton Indian Band land.

Salmon are sorted by gender and quality, then loaded into bags and floated down the river into larger tanks which would bring them up to the hatchery for fertilization.

On Friday, staff were hard at work collecting eggs from mature fish.

Hatchery Biologist Tyson Marsel said numbers wise this year they ended up expecting about 9,000 to 27,000 fish to be in the Okanagan river spawning. In prior years, it's been a lot more.

"The year before, it was about 200,000 to 220,000 fish that we had spawning," he said. "Years like this, the hatchery becomes a really important factor in that we can supplement some fish, we can help out this run in hopes that four years later, some of our hatchery fish can come back and help all these fish that really struggled."

The hatchery work began in the late 1990s, as an experimental reintroduction into Skaha Lake, since there were no salmon upstream of McIntyre dam.

The long-term program aims to restore the historical range of sockeye in the upper Okanagan watershed, Okanagan Lake, and Skaha Lake systems — part of the Columbia River Basin.

Eggs collected from local four-year-old fish are fertilized before spending a couple weeks in incubators and maturing into alevins and then fry.

The salmon that were picked up from the river and brought in for egg collection are returned to the river where they would have died naturally, to decompose and provide nutrients for the ecosystem.

The reintroduction started in 2004 officially, and ever since then, the team has slowly been putting in hatchery fry they raise.

"What our release strategy is to release our fish into those tributaries in the Okanagan Lake in the hopes that when these fish come back, they can target spawning in those different reaches within the Okanagan Lake," Marsel said.

"All the habitat, all the habitat restoration work, everything has an effect on the run, and every little bit counts."

Every single year the sockeye salmon and chinook salmon make their journey from the ocean, all the way up into the Okanagan river system.

Hatchery teams get a first look at salmon return numbers when they swim past Bonneville Dam, the very first dam at the bottom of Columbia River.

"This year we had about 353,000 sockeye that came up through Bonneville Dam. And we can track those fish from 353,000 all the way up the whole entire river system, passing each and every dam, all nine of them on the way up until they pass our last dam," Marsel said.

At the last dam, when the fish entered the confluence of the Okanagan River, 127,000 fish were recorded.

"So once they've passed that we kind of have a small expectation of how many fish are actually going to make it spawning... Being 127,000, that's an all right year, the prior year is about 470,000."

Marsel said the team noticed a hold up at the change from the Columbia to Okanagan River due to a thermal barrier.

"So there's a certain temperature threshold in which these fish can migrate and travel through the river system through the freshwater. Once it hits a certain temperature, these fish do not like to travel anymore. So the Okanagan river being so warm up here in the desert and such a small system —we're very shallow and channelized in a lot of areas—we do run into temperature problems."

Since the Columbia River is fed from glacier waters, the temperature change into the Okanagan River can be an increase of anywhere from 6 C to 10 C.

And with no rain or dip in temperatures, the fish return greatly dropped for this year.

"Some years are really good. There's a lot of fish in the system and we can allow a lot of these fish to spawn naturally. And then there's really hard years where there's not a lot of fish in the system. And the hatchery is going to have a huge benefit to that run for future run," Marsel added.

"Because we're a conservation hatchery, we don't want to totally take over this whole entire run. Our goal in the end is to have these fish 100 per cent spawning naturally and take out that whole entire hatchery genetic code out of the whole entire system. That would be our final end goal of the hatchery here. I don't know if we'll ever get there. But we will try our best to put in our little bit of time each and every year."

The work also stands out because of the importance of the return to the Syilx community and the Okanagan Nation.

Marsel said with the majority of the staff being Indigenous at the hatchery, every single one of them cares about the culture and the connection.

"Working for an Indigenous organization and myself being a member of the Syilx Nation, I'm a Lower Similkameen Indian Band member, on a personal level to do this work and have my small impact on our whole entire community...and making my little difference, every single fish counts. It just warms my heart really is the best way to put it when I can personally make an impact."